


the sound of thawing ice: a knocking on the door

by coldhope, winglessdrake



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brainwashing, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Multi, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 03:30:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1842739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope, https://archiveofourown.org/users/winglessdrake/pseuds/winglessdrake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Personally I could totally stand to read half a dozen more fics that open with Bucky waking up in a bunker somewhere, lost and forgotten." --<a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/winglessdrake/pseuds/winglessdrake">winglessdrake</a></p><p>Or, to put it another way, coming out of cryo under controlled conditions is bad. Coming out of it forgotten and alone in the darkness is unspeakable. Luckily, the world outside still offers holes to hide in, and places from which to watch events unfold. And, inevitably, one person who stirs waking memories he is not sure he can bear - and knows that he must bear them, if he lets them in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sound of thawing ice: a knocking on the door

It is December 25, 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev hands over the launch codes to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The world has been changed, though the majority of its inhabitants have yet to know it.

Inventories are taken of the defunct union’s assets, and decisions on storage and disarmament are made by the governments of each newly independent republic. Arguments on the disposition of these resources are widespread. Record-keeping is inconsistent. Soon, no one quite remembers where everything is stored.

In the dark, in the quiet—except for the hum of a compressor cycling—time passes.

1995\. Norman Thagard becomes the first American to ride into space on a Russian Soyuz launched from Baikonur. 168 people die in the Oklahoma City bombing. The NATO bombing campaign begins in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The DVD is introduced. In a sealed, abandoned bunker in Belarus, the plutonium cores of two radioisotope thermal generators continue to decay.

2000\. Putin is elected president of Russia. The first resident crew enters the International Space Station. Iraq rejects UN Security Council weapons inspection proposals. In Belarus, the mounts of a refrigeration compressor that has been running steadily since 1991 have developed fatigue microcracking from the constant vibration.

2001\. 2,997 people die in the September 11 attacks. The United States withdraws from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. One of the compressor mounts partially fails, causing increased vibration and metal stress. The cores of the RTGs continue to decay.

2002\. Bush and Putin sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Brazil wins the World Cup. The US Department of Homeland Security is established. Increased vibration causes stress crystallization to begin in the connectors of the refrigerant loop.

2005\. North Korea announces it has nuclear weapons capability. Deep Throat’s identity is revealed. The Provisional IRA announces the end of its 36-year campaign. Cracking at the connectors causes a minute leak of refrigerant to develop.

2007\. An energy dispute between Russia and Belarus arises. North Korea agrees to shut down its nuclear facilities. Several of the bimetallic strip thermocouples in one RTG fail, reducing its output to 50% total capacity. The other generator is operating at 70% of its initial capacity. Loss of refrigerant due to the leak, combined with reduced power from the generators, has reduced cooling efficiency of the system to approximately 67% of design specifications.

2009\. H1N1 influenza is declared a pandemic. Somali pirates capture a cargo vessel. Michael Jackson dies. Efficiency of the system is now reduced to 49%.

2011\. The Arab Spring uprisings begin. US President Barack Obama announces the death of Osama bin Laden. NASA ends the shuttle program. Stressed beyond all bearing, lacking in power, the system finally undergoes catastrophic failure when stress crystallization and microcracks in the refrigerant tubing cause a break, releasing the remaining refrigerant. The compressor cuts out. For the first time in twenty years, there is complete silence in this dark, dust-furred, forgotten space.

Inside the sealed chamber, the temperature begins to rise.

~

 _you have slept the sleep of ages_  
 _when you wake you’re all alone_  
 _and it all comes back in stages_  
 _to you out here in the zone_  
\--Tony Carey, _The Red Door_

The first thing is pain. In the beginning, there is pain. First there is nothing, and then there is pain; and then there is nothing _but_ pain, astonishing, filling the whole world from edge to edge. Without light, without air, without movement, the only way the nameless man knows he exists is that he hurts. Perhaps this is what he is for, to hurt. Perhaps this is his purpose.

He does not know how long it takes him to become aware of his body as a thing that has limits and edges, that he is physically separate from the surfaces that surround him. Nor does he know how long it takes from the moment consciousness begins to return to the moment when he has sufficient control over his muscles to open his mouth and scream. He can remember how to scream. That one comes back quickly. 

It's not long before he runs out of air to scream with, in this tight enclosed space. As his consciousness develops further the pain differentiates itself into various kinds, various languages, all clamoring together for his limited attention. It's hard to expand his ribcage. His lungs feel thick and wet, heavy, like sodden wool socks. They object to being made to do work; they would much rather go back to being so close to still. Like wading through treacle a thought slogs its way into the nameless man's mind: _I can't breathe._

Another joins it: _I am an I. I. Me, me, I._

_I am real. I am real and that means I need to breathe._

_There isn't any air in here._

_But if I am in here then there is an outside to here._

Muscles that have not moved in two decades scream shrilly as they are forced into action. He has arms, legs. He has one arm. The other is icy cold and hard, like metal, and he does not think it belongs to him, but perhaps it will obey his commands. In the complete darkness of his prison the nameless man moves, shifts, desperately slow and uncoordinated: his whole body has been asleep. But eventually he has his palms flat against the hard surface above his face, and _pushes_.

Metal creaks and squalls. He can feel it bending under his left hand, the surface getting farther away from him, but he has to break off, gasping for breath, and rest before trying again. The second time, a crack of light appears. There is light and air outside this metal shell.

That's enough to override his muscles, which are screaming. He has made enough space now to draw back his strange left hand in a fist, and punches upward with a bitter clang. Again. The crack grows. He is desperate. Again. The air coming through it tastes inexpressibly sweet. Again, and suddenly the whole world is no longer closed and dark, it is huge and terribly, viciously, blindingly bright. The nameless man curls up in his opened prison, huddled as tightly in on himself as his painfully stiff muscles and tendons will allow. All of the light has been let in, all the light there is; and now he must bear it, even if the brilliance feels as if it's burning away every inch of his skin. 

~

He has no idea how much time has passed when he is next aware, just that time _has_ passed. The light is still far too bright, but he can open his eyes wider than a pained slit now, make out the shapes of things. He is in a long room mostly piled high with boxes and crates. Each edge seems oddly soft and rounded, but he realizes that this is because of the soft fur of dust draping everything like a grey snowfall. 

He is naked. His left arm is made out of metal. Somehow it does what he tells it to do, stiff and uncomfortable, but under his control. The shiny plates that make up the surface slide and shift when he moves, locking into place when he pushes against something or squeezes his fist closed. The place where his flesh meets the metal is a mess of ropy scar tissue.

(He can feel the metal under the skin in some places. It's part of him. He doesn't know how.)

His other arm and legs are solid with muscle, even if it's still agonizingly stiff and weak. His fingers and toes are numb, tingling, and he thinks there might be something wrong with them, but there is something wrong with all the rest of him, so it barely signifies. His chest hurts. He can hear his own breathing. It still feels as if his lungs are made of soggy wool.

He is an I, he is a person, an awareness, a being. But he does not yet have a name. 

The light is coming from a bank of fluorescents, humming noisily. They are attached to something that is watching him, because if he stays still long enough, the lights switch off. As soon as he moves again there is a click and the tubes flicker into life once more. The power cables seem to feed from a pair of odd squat flanged cylindrical objects, very warm to the touch, beside the thing in which he'd woken up. That had turned out to be a sort of insulated tank or chamber, made out of metal and surrounded by a sort of lattice of thin copper tubing. The tubing leads to a machine which smells faintly of overheated insulation. It is silent. Whatever its purpose had been, it is over now. 

A sudden awareness of cold, biting-cold, killing-cold, so deep it burns, surfaces in his mind whenever he looks at the tank. He tries to avoid looking at it. Something about the way that memory flicks its tail, disappearing again into the darkness behind his eyes, is horrible. 

More time passes. When he wakes again his mind is clearer and the marks stenciled on the crates all around him form words he can read. He is shivering now and then in little fits, and a fine sheen of sweat has formed on his skin; his fingertips come away from his forehead wet. He's very aware of being naked now, which he hadn't been before. 

Moving slowly, stiffly, like a very old man, he begins to search through the crates and boxes for something to wrap himself in against the chill. He strikes it lucky after what feels like hours of effort: some of the boxes are stenciled with sigils that mean _surplus_ and inside are thin cheap uniform pants. The cloth rasps against his skin strangely. He wonders how long he slept inside the tank chamber, and who put him there, and why. Again, something dark stirs behind his eyes, something he does not really want to see too closely, and he pushes away the question of what he might once have been. 

Abruptly he is too cold, much too cold, and wraps another pair of pants round his shoulders. Cloth against his skin again. Strange, not pleasant, but somehow comforting in his ongoing awareness of it, of having something wrapped around him, of being touched. He crouches by the flanged cylinders, reaching out his hands to their warmth, which seems to come out of nowhere. Heat on his skin is painful like everything else, and his fingers' tingling and fizzing gets worse at first and then begins to ease. He stays there, huddled, until the chill passes and the heat from the cylinders becomes uncomfortable. 

Several times he comes closer to warm up and then retreats to cool off before he notices the yellow sign printed on one of the cylinders. It's a circle with three red fan shapes round a central red dot. He doesn't know exactly what it means, only that it's bad, that it indicates danger, and after that he keeps his distance and stays shivering. 

His grasp on time is still loose, slipping.

Sound feels deadened, dull, in this dust-furred chamber. He finds his own voice eventually, a whistling creak from a throat used to stillness and silence. It hurts at first. Everything hurts. He tries just making sounds, guttural little grunts, and they slowly become syllables of what might be words. His lips and tongue are just as out of practice as the rest of him. Eventually, though, he manages a sentence. It is a very short sentence. It is perhaps the shortest sentence of all.

"I am," says the nameless man, alone in his room, his forgotten room, with its forgotten things. And again, stronger this time, with more certainty behind it: "I am."


End file.
